Lives began on historic flights
THE VIETNAMESE MAN’S FACE meant little to Atsuko Schlesinger, but his words erased nearly 30 years of heartbreaking wonder.
Atsuko, who lives in Coeur d’Alene, met Thanh Jeff Gahr late last month at a World Airways reunion in Oakland, Calif.
Jeff, who prefers his American name now, told Atsuko he was a 12-year-old on a World Airways flight out of Saigon in 1975 with his 14-year-old brother. Atsuko was a flight attendant on the special flight arranged to save war-ravaged South Vietnamese orphans as the North Vietnamese army overtook Saigon.
Fifty-seven children were on the flight, but Jeff’s brother was the face stuck in Atsuko’s mind.
“Vietnamese soldiers made him get off because he could serve in the army,” she says softly. She had tried to protect the boy, but she was no match for the armed soldiers. The pain of that experience left her with a dull heartache she could never shake. What had happened to that boy?
Jeff told her. His brother left Saigon on another plane just days after Jeff’s World Airways flight, was adopted by an American family and now lives in Oregon.
“I’m so happy to know he’s doing well,” Atsuko says. “It makes me feel so warm that his new life started from that aircraft.”
Atsuko beams now with the unexpected gift of relief Jeff gave her. The reunion promised answers about long-lost co-workers and a chance to share recollections of a near-death experience. Jeff elevated it to jubilation.
Atsuko, 60, didn’t know World Airways had reunions until five years ago, after her story ran in this column. She shared her experiences as a flight attendant with World Airways when the company offered terrified people in Danang, Vietnam, a last flight out before communists took over the city. A friend of an engineer on that historic flight read her story and sent it to the engineer, who called Atsuko to invite her to the reunions World Airways throws every few years.
Atsuko left the airline in the late 1970s, moved to Coeur d’Alene in 1991 and caters special events and works in a women’s clothing store now.
She was thrilled to learn about the World Airways reunions, but work kept her from the next one scheduled. She promised herself she wouldn’t miss another. The following one was in Oakland, World Airways’ old headquarters, in October this year.
Oakland celebrates its World Airways history in two museums.
The airline airlifted military personnel and supplies across the Pacific during the Vietnam conflict. It provided rest and relaxation flights for battle-weary soldiers and delivered Stars and Stripes, the military newspaper, to Vietnam.
World Airways is best known, though, for its March 29, 1975, flight from Danang to Saigon, a death-defying last flight out of Danang before the city fell to the communists. A few weeks later, the airline began shuttling orphans from war-torn Saigon to Oakland until Saigon also fell.
Atsuko worked the Danang flight and the first baby-lift. World Airways director Edward Daly planned the refugee flight from Danang to save women and children. But the 727 was mobbed by terrified South Vietnamese soldiers desperate to escape the city before the communists arrived.
The crew was terrified. Soldiers trampled women and children and pulled them off the stairs to the plane. Daly knocked soldiers away with a pistol and his fists. The 727 had room for 125 passengers, but nearly 350 had crammed themselves into seats, the baggage compartment and wheel wells when Capts. Ken Healy and Bill Keating started taxiing.
A grenade blew a basketball-sized hole in one of the 727’s flaps. Soldiers shot at the plane and it hit a pole on takeoff. The plane’s hydraulic system collapsed and its back door wouldn’t close. The 727 had to fly low or risk a loss of oxygen. The 40-minute flight to Saigon took nearly two hours. Only 11 women and children made it onto the flight. The soldiers who had fled were arrested in Saigon.
Atsuko’s memory of the flight is strong. She remembers collecting weapons from the soldiers and carrying grenades in each hand to the food compartment for storage. She remembers a news cameraman throwing his camera to a co-worker on the plane when desperate people stopped him from boarding. She learned later that he made it out on a helicopter the next day.
She remembers lifting fainting people from the aisle and shoving them into seats already occupied by two other people. She remembers surreptitiously pushing ice – the only food or water on the plane – into suffering people’s mouths so others couldn’t see what she had.
But the museums reminded Atsuko of things she’d forgotten.
“They were shooting at us,” she says. “I’d forgotten that eight people were killed at the bottom of the stairway.”
One of the museums had enlarged a photo that ran in Fortune magazine of Atsuko and Daly after the April 1975 baby-lift. She had a copy of the photo, but it still surprised her to see her smiling face in a World Airways flight attendant uniform on a museum wall in Oakland.
Atsuko knew only a handful of people at the World Airways reunion, but they were people who had risked their lives with her – the two captains and the senior flight attendant. Their strongest memories were of moments she hadn’t seen in the chaos. The senior flight attendant talked of the woman she tried to pull onto the plane by grasping her hand. She lost the hand when someone stepped on the woman and climbed over her.
The captains, so heroic in Atsuko’s memory, are in their 80s now. They’ve shrunk, but their memories were strong.
“They remembered me,” Atsuko says, smiling. “They gave me big hugs.”
The biggest hug came from Jeff. He didn’t know Atsuko in 1975 and she didn’t remember him. But Jeff tracked down the reunion to finally thank the people who had salvaged his life.
“If it wasn’t for that flight, I wouldn’t be leading the life I have right now,” Jeff says. He’s an electrical engineer for Boeing in Seattle. “People like Atsuko, Bill and Ken risked their lives to take me out of the country.”
Jeff was 3 and 4 when his parents died in 1965 and 1966. He and his brothers, known now as Jason and Jeremy, were taken to an orphanage in Qui Nhon, a small town in the middle of Vietnam. An American woman, Sherry Clark, was determined to save as many orphans as she could before communists overtook the country. She managed to get her group in Qui Nhon on the first World Airways baby-lift out of Saigon.
Times were desperate and the South Vietnamese army grabbed anyone able to shoot a weapon. Soldiers saw Jason, who was 14, on the flight and ordered him off. Atsuko’s heart broke for the hundredth time during those war years.
Jeff tracked down information on last month’s World Airways reunion so he could thank the baby-lift crew. He was overjoyed that Atsuko and the head flight attendant on the baby-lift flight also attended the reunion.
“It felt like I was meeting old friends even though I didn’t know her (Atsuko),” Jeff says. “I felt like I had known her a long time and was really surprised she remembers Jason.”
Jeff told Atsuko that Jason left Saigon just a few days after soldiers had removed him from her flight. The three brothers were adopted by different families in McMinnville, Ore., and grew up within five miles of each other. Jason Trieu is now a software engineer in Portland.
“Jeff was the most excitement of the reunion,” Atsuko says. “He’s such a nice young man, seems like a wonderful person.”
Jeff left Atsuko with an invitation to visit his home and family and promised to let Jason know when she was coming.
“I was glad to show her she made a difference in somebody’s life,” he says. “I hope she feels good about what she did, making somebody’s life a much better life.”